“Chapter 6. Research: A Web of Writing Practices and Publics” in “High Stakes, High Hopes”
A Web of Writing Practices and Publics
The partnership produced a wide variety of genres of research publication, from research posters, popular books, maps, and a Yellow Pages directory to academic articles, student theses, and this book. Publications were diverse in form, in their origins, purpose, and intent, produced in a range of writing practices and for diversely situated publics, in the plural.
Through publications, we navigated writing. Unlike the research interviewing process, anchored squarely in the neighborhood, writing was driven more by the university, through student writing on the research, our class and its pedagogies, and my own scholarly work. We experimented with writing and genre. We inserted it in varied ways into our research process. Research posters, for instance, became part of our process, to share analysis early on, to build a conversation and to account for our interviewing work. They were a genre that we brought back to the neighborhood, to our partners and those individuals and families interviewed. They aimed to invite conversation and debate immediately after the research was finished. We developed popular books to share narratives, to highlight lived experiences we researched. Sometimes an issue required and demanded harder data, such as maps, which more systemically visualized an issue or debate like housing access or settlement building.
Some genres recurred annually, such as posters and maps; these lay at the heart of the partnership and its process of working and researching. Some publications were distinct, unique, spinning out in specific ways, singular and narrow. Some stretched, in their inclusiveness. They wove thickly and durably, existing beyond a particular project. Others were soft and fragile, threaded more thinly.
In this chapter, I share the stories of producing these genres of publication, their logics, and possibilities. The politics and trajectories of publications, for instance, were sometimes contradictory. A map, seemingly neutral and objective, could quickly be drawn on to tell a story and to make an argument. A journal article, seemingly a scholarly privilege, could ground and land elsewhere. Our Yellow Pages, intended for local use, could easily be caught up in wider city politics.
In examining these genres and their interplay, I reflect on the web of publics, politics, and the slices of “city” varied publications brought to view. I explore when, why, and for whom genres of publication proved critical. I consider the ways in which different types of publications enabled ways to account, engage, and review our research work. Here my intent is to juxtapose, not reify, the differences between forms of writing, grounded in their particular geographies and in the partnership and its collaborative method and approach. In working in and between conventional categorizations of popular and political or scholarly and theoretical forms, the partnership publications stretched notions of research writing and expanded forms of urban theorizing.
Research Posters Taped to Walls
The research posters were displayed, big and bulky, visual and vivid. They were taped to the walls of the neighborhood crèche in which we held the research party for the project on home-based businesses and making ends meet, scheduled three-quarters of the way through the semester. The posters aimed to invite conversation and debate, to share early findings with our partners and those individuals and families interviewed.
We started the proceedings, the semiformal part of the event: a moment to thank our partners and the families and individuals interviewed. Our neighborhood partners and students offered their thoughts and words. For instance, Lefien reflected on the research presented on the posters on the walls around us. Her words in Afrikaans held the room. She spoke powerfully about the posters, their reflection on the neighborhood economy, about everybody’s efforts to stay afloat, about unemployment and its ills. Her analysis reflected our project and her knowledge accrued in years of trade union activism, her present work as a piece-rate seamstress, working evenings in a garage in Athlone, about five kilometers away. After Lefien, students shared their thoughts and experiences. Residents acknowledged and teased their favorites, calling on them to speak.
The public nature of the posters was important and provocative. They were by design engageable, readable, intended to be recognizable. The stories they included were direct from interviews, with photos of homes and families, of varied neighborhood contexts. Families could read their own stories, and their neighbors’, see themselves and others. Unlike less accessible journal articles and books, the posters attracted all sorts of readers and an immediate set of comments and discussion. They also showed the making of the research, its method, and location in particular interviews and homes: on Polar Street, as opposed to Joanna Street, at Aunty Eleanor’s home as opposed to Fatima’s house.
We introduced research posters to share the research more effectively. The sharing was key. Each story had to stand up to scrutiny in the neighborhood. The poster presentation held the research teams, the students and our partners, to account because those we interviewed came to read our work and to participate in the discussion and celebration. The research poster needed to portray the reality it engaged, what it meant to be living in Sewende Laan, the struggles of home-based businesses, or the passions of Klopse, for example. The public conversations generated through the posters shaped the careful ways in which we translated and brought individual interviews and life histories into analysis. It grounded the ways in which we mapped and shared photographs. They were an accessible and open way to develop ideas, to test and share emerging arguments. They produced a rigor, one that was immersed in the neighborhood as well as in the university.
Conventionally a conference device for showcasing mainstream academic papers, the poster form was transformed in this context. Its purpose was refigured to share our process and to test the ways in which this work resonated with those with whom it was produced. Posters challenged students because they required visual conceptualization, as well as narrative and analytical strategies. The success or failure of our posters built on the ways in which the research was recognizable, resonant, the ways it did or did not speak to truths, everyday practices, hardships in some cases, celebrations in others. The posters and their emergent stories aimed to reflect the nuance and contingency of the ways in which we had listened, asked, and engaged. They challenged students to account for the knowledge, to situate it in context, to locate it. The poster, as a genre, and the research party, as an event at which we shared it, extended the rigor of our work. Its public engagement put center stage the politics of how and for whom we produced this knowledge, to whom we had to account.
FIGURE 15. Research posters
They were looking hard, examining, tracing their fingers down Long Street. This family was gathered around the map of Agste Laan, the newest and most controversial informal settlement or land occupation in the neighborhood. All women, two older, three younger, a baby in arms—I moved a little closer to join them. “Look, there we are. That’s our place, our door. See us, I am in the picture.” For this family, finding oneself on the map was a moment of profound recognition, a small but concrete form of acknowledgement. This moment was precious for our project too, a glimpse into what it might mean for a “shack dweller” in a relatively new and insecure settlement to find her house on the map. It was these layers of identification, of territory, of home building in the face of so many odds that the map shared and legitimated. It was its readability, its legibility that marked its difference and helped families find themselves, literally see themselves on this map, in the settlement.
We were in the big Nooitgedacht Community Hall, posters and maps tacked to the dark turquoise walls. The Agste Laan map hung in the center of the longer wall, huge and a little unconventional. Each research team had contributed a representation of their research area. These sections of the map were pieced together, a multiscaled jigsaw, a complex task. The map marked and celebrated Agste Laan’s first birthday, its survival despite city policy, the odds stacked against it and the families who had relocated here. The map recorded and reflected the extraordinary work of the settlement’s making, the piece-by-piece construction of homes, the everyday work of building and settling. Its form disrupted convention, piecing together photographs, hand drawings, textures of homes, and streets, which created a thick, layered representation of the settlement. In this collage form the map recorded families finding a space in the city, inserting themselves into the neighborhood, being present, building homes and security incrementally and precariously, here and now.
The map was also the culmination of the research project, an aggregation of the work of all the research teams across Agste Laan. Research teams were asked to record plots, according to their sizes, and homes, their shapes and building forms, the conversations they had with home builders and with settlement families. Research teams had opted to complete this research work in various ways. Many had the home and plot marked, a picture of the home layered on top. In some cases, the photos recorded, and in some cases, celebrated, the home itself. Some homes called out for this attention, for instance, the beautiful pink house on Bubblegum Street, the home with the immaculate brickwork going into the off-street parking and stoep on Long Street, and the white and black polka dot fencing marking the garden of a house built closer to Modderdam Road. Other research teams chose to include a photograph of the family in the house, the residents themselves. These photos spoke for themselves, often carefully composed, families standing together, some with smiles, proud, others more ambiguous.
The map was also much more than these individual pieces and layers. It blew open a narrow notion of research and data as an expert-driven process. It disrupted a Cartesian, god’s-eye view. It was a map, at scale; it was also intimate, a pieced-together product of our research, a portal into our process, a rich source of knowledge. It brought into its topography photographs of families, standing outside homes, working on roofs, building walls, making this settlement a place to call home. It gave shape and texture to the work of home building, tracked in the photographs, in the brickwork, in the spacing and organizing of this informal settlement. It demonstrated the messy texturing and building of the community, homes constructed on top of an old netball court, the reconstituting of municipal fencing around a wetland as the settlement encroached and swallowed it. It hinted at the networks and relationships connecting settlement families. It was relational in a secondary sense as well, a product of our partnership and this research. We were in and on it, as were our partners too, those who lived in the settlement, as residents and as researchers. They were a critical part of this map and knowledge making.
Maps were central to most of our research, a genre we could share, which our partners could use in their organizing and mobilizing. Our maps were also part of our method, a way to track our interviewing and systematize our research, and a form of analysis, a record of neighborhood spatial patterns and dynamics. They were a particularly important publication genre in our projects on housing insecurity, in the Agste Laan and Sewende Laan research, and in the backyard projects. In these contexts, the maps marked as present and significant families that were technically, officially, and politically landless and illegal. The map visually shared this critical work to self-construct homes, to find and develop shelter, to not only claim land but to make a place.
I drew on slivers of the stories of families living in this informal settlement in several scholarly articles. What happened to the settlement’s form and content in this shift in genre?
FIGURE 16. The Agste Laan map on the wall
In some ways journal articles sat far from the worlds of everyday life in this neighborhood. They were built in sets of engagements with colleagues, assembled in varied university-linked discussions. Each published piece was a slice of the partnership’s work, separated out and distilled in the frame and focus of the journal in which it was published, in the preciseness of its scholarly conversation, dimensions, and written conventions. In the logics of writing and publishing journal articles, the partnership and the everyday neighborhood world of its practice were rendered visible and made digestible in partial and always-specific ways.
Different strands of work shaped my writing for journals from the partnership. They evolved in particular ways in published finished form. In a jointly authored piece, for example, my colleague Charlotte Lemanski engaged with elite gated communities, the focus of her research at the time, and I reflected on city responses to land occupation from the partnership work (Lemanski and Oldfield 2009). The comparative kernel for the article emerged out of a meeting in Paris on “Territorialization in Cities of the South,” a conversation between French, South African, and Indian researchers. In contrast, in a book chapter written with my colleague Kristian Stokke focused on practices and politics of neoliberalism, I drew on fine-grained narratives of the anti-eviction and anti–cost recovery strategies of the Civic, inspired by Gerty’s and George’s leadership. Although collaboration with Kristian originated in a workshop on the politics of democracy and decentralization, this chapter was published as part of a collection, Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers (2007), edited by Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard, geographers intent on building a global comparative conversation to challenge narrow notions of neoliberalism and its city politics and governance effects.
The trajectories of the papers were, of course, specific. They were shaped by the research materials, but the argument of each paper evolved in the specific scholarly conversation, the genealogies of past published work we drew on, and its dimensions and vocabularies. Charlotte and I, for instance, suggested the need for more careful interpretation of the contextual and relational logics of local processes such as gating and invading, as well as a more precise assessment of the state’s engagement with these urban development processes in increasingly southern cities like Cape Town. The article’s published form in Environment and Planning A led to a particular register of theory, rooted in each case but framed in a language and literature of state-society encounters in a body of work on southern cities. In the chapter with Kristian, we moved between fine-grained narratives of activism and social theory that challenged monotone accounts of neoliberal city politics. These dual threads connected the chapter across the collected volume Contesting Neoliberalism, which tracked powerful acts of city making between and across the global south and global north, making visible the tensions and practices that shape neoliberalism in practice and in the plural. My parts of the article and book chapter were products of the partnership work, but little of it was evident in the final form of either piece. The visible slivers of the partnership were determined by the arguments and the conventions of the journal and the edited book in which we published the work.
By their nature, accredited articles and scholarly book chapters are a particular kind of urban genre, a specific form of theory, bound up in a scholarly review process. Each paper was submitted and underwent a rigorous review process, an anonymous set of assessments. In the book chapter, driven by the edited design, our piece was interrogated on its own terms and placed in conversation precisely with the project of the volume. In the article on land occupations, reviewers challenged us to situate more accurately the comparison at a conceptual scale. The reviewers were not overly concerned or engaged with our rendering of the gating and occupation practices but asked us to be much clearer in the analytical work embedded in our comparison. The most critical reviewer could not stomach our comparing such opposites: land invasions with gated communities, although it was the essence and point of our argument and paper. We edited, revised, and polished, defending our selective engagement to the editors in writing, drawing on the language of the journal and its forms of review and critique.
This protocol for publishing was a politics of academic submission, a form of accounting and vetting steeped in a particular type of hierarchically organized scholarly public. It was steered by editors, their networks of and negotiations with reviewers, as well as their assessment of our work, their imagination of the publication audience and conversation. In each case, the peer-review process pushed us to edit and refine, to carefully layer, polish, and make each argument precise. Eventually, each piece was finalized, officially vetted, proofed, and copyedited. Each entered the virtual world of online journal downloading and hard copy and e-form, in select libraries, shaped by academic library subscriptions and the geographies of purchasing possibilities and limits.
This academic review process and its politics were bound up, on the one hand, in broader processes of professional development, career building, research funding, and the like. On the other, they were anchored in some form of networked anonymity, explicit in its “double blindness” in which authors and reviewers remained anonymous. Conversation and accounting were channeled through the editors and their discretion to accept our responses. This review process was so different from those that we accounted to in the neighborhood in research parties and through popular books. These contrasting accounts were public, in person, intimate, a sharing of neighborhood experiences and stories. They shared and assessed our capacities to put experiences into words and arguments, to assess what was at stake, to make it visual and visceral in photos and on maps on the walls of the neighborhood hall and its crèche.
FIGURE 17. Deciphering the practice
In select ways, the worlds of the neighborhood and the partnership were made visible in my scholarly publishing, part of a register and record, part of not only our project archive but a broader urban debate, woven together. While presented at best as exemplary and bracketed, in partial form, the textured everyday realities of the neighborhood nonetheless entered the world of scholarly urban debate. In other ways, each published article and book chapter sat far from the worlds and lives of families in the neighborhood and in its settlement, the contexts that inspired my own thinking and contributions to my published work. In stark contrast, partnership publications were designed precisely for the neighborhood.
Yellow Pages in Every Household
The Yellow Pages, a neighborhood business directory, for instance, was completed for the project on making ends meet. Yet, the public in this publication was not straightforward or simple, either. Despite our intent to publish something useful for the neighborhood directly, the Yellow Pages did not reduce neatly to this narrow notion.
We printed fifteen hundred copies of the neighborhood business directory, which our partners dropped off door-by-door across Valhalla Park. The Yellow Pages was a simple but effective record. It documented all the businesses that we mapped and interviewed in 2012. It was the result of rigorous and informed research, a systematic assessment of the neighborhood, a process in which we had combed each street, interviewed those businesses marked through signage, and found those less visible, small enterprises in homes, in the neighborhood’s nooks and crannies. Families often knew about the places on their block, across the street, the larger establishments: the fish shop, the bakery, and a convenience store, all formal establishments on Angela Road, the main thoroughfare. But others were invisible to those other than neighbors, to those not in the know. The photographers and videographers, the spice shops, the informal fish suppliers, the bakers and sewing outfits, the small ways that families experimented to make ends meet, to earn a little, and in some instances, to keep long-standing family traditions alive in the form of these businesses. It was these small initiatives, some signposted, others not at all, that the research documented and the Yellow Pages shared. Only by immersing ourselves in the neighborhood could we become “in the know,” our collective research objective.
The research project was completed amid neighborhood and citywide xenophobic violence (discussed in chapter 4 of this book). Could we still publish the Yellow Pages in this polarized and violent context? Worriedly, I asked Gerty this question prior to its printing. The research had not focused explicitly on xenophobia, but this emotive and violent politics shaped any publishing of research on home-based or small businesses in this moment. This was an important question, reflective of the complexities of producing alternative research outputs. Gerty responded to my question clearly and directly. We must publish the Yellow Pages. It was even more important to do so in this context. Publishing it was part of our accountability as a partnership, a collective decision, configured so differently from a conventional framing of this question in an unpartnered, academic context.
FIGURE 18. Our Yellow Pages
I moved forward with the printing. An agent at Top Copy printers helped. He gave us a good price for our fifteen hundred copies when he learned of our intent. He figured out a pocket-size version, small yet locatable. He brought the Yellow Pages alive by redesigning our cover, bringing the man known as the Pastor, a local leader and businessman, to the forefront, a visual invitation to open the directory. It was in this very politicized context, following the forced removal of Somali and most other “foreign” traders, that this simple document made its way across the area. A presence, not a solution, it marked the end of our project, the purpose of our interviews, our going door-to-door.
The Yellow Pages did not directly address xenophobia and the attendant politics and violence. Instead, it situated it, bringing to the fore layers of complex issues in which xenophobia operated and erupted. These included, for instance, the histories of neighborhood businesses, their successes and longevity, as well as failures; the specific patterns and practices of gangsterism that shaped neighborhood streets and access to business spaces; and the reality and hardships that sustained and provided a logic to the networks that interlinked the neighborhood and broader city informal economy. The Yellow Pages was distributed to all the households in the neighborhood. It prompted us to rework our thinking. On the one hand, it showed a neighborhood hard at work, eking out a living. On the other, its shadows revealed xenophobic tensions, stories of competition, and the feelings that drove that xenophobia. Through its recording of the businesses burned out, run out of the neighborhood, their presence remained, if in that moment only on paper.
As an alternative genre of publication organized explicitly for the neighborhood, the Yellow Pages sat in this visceral, violent politics, its contestation of the right to work, to be in this neighborhood and others like it across the city and nation. Immersed in questions of identity and violence, the Yellow Pages made visible a layer of the meta-politics of the city and the research itself, its purpose, its intent, its publics and politics.
Gerty laughed as she recalled the telephone call from a friend from Belhar, a neighborhood five or so kilometers from Valhalla Park. “Did you see that book about you, about Valhalla Park?” the friend asked. Gerty retorted, “I told her: That is my book, I wrote that book!” The Valhalla Park Community Entertainers: Klopse Building a Better Neighbourhood was in demand. The two hundred copies printed flew out of Gerty’s front door, into the hands of residents, the troupe, the Klopse Board, and the councilor.
For both the projects on Klopse and Sewende Laan, we developed the stories and experiences for publication in short-book form, a genre to share the research, to highlight lived experiences and struggles, to ensure these struggles and hard everyday realities reached the public domain. Both books documented the Civic’s work and mobilization, sharing the intimate practices that made Klopse happen and that sustained families in the Sewende Laan informal settlement. These short books worked as a mode of writing and critique that could contribute to the Civic’s work, to its activism, to forms of neighborhood building. Popular, political, and advocatory, they offered alternative stories and accounts from our research that rubbed up against and challenged a discourse of deficit and lack—of informality and marginality—that so often characterized the neighborhood and its place in debates in the literature and the city.
The Klopse book, for instance, was beautiful, warm, alive, sharing page after page, story after story, and photographs of proud residents, the performers, singers, costume makers, the cooks behind the scenes, the leaders engineering the logistics and coordinating the buses and uniforms, the directors and the coaches leading biweekly practices throughout much of the year. The text highlighted the commitment and passion of Gerty and other Klopse leaders, many of whom were our research partners too. The book shared the hard “engineering” and organizing work that underlay Klopse and the neighborhood troupe’s participation year after year. It made clear its effects, the ways it built community in the neighborhood, in the yearlong neighborhood fundraising and coordinating, and training of the minstrels, young and old, and in its pinnacle, the performance in the city center and neighborhood at the New Year, and in the annual summer competition season.
The book substantiated Klopse as the glue that sustained and legitimated the Civic, as an organization, and its leaders, as representative of this neighborhood, year after year. Klopse brought a wide array of residents into the minstrel troupe, and through it, into the Civic. Young mothers met older activists, not just as neighbors but also as leaders of the troupe. They enrolled their young children as trompoppies (drum majorettes), marching decked out in Klopse gear, a key part of every troupe. Children participated in the youth choir, attending weekend practices for months on end. Mothers came along, listening at first, joining later, as they were increasingly woven into the fabric of the Civic and its work. Young men spoke of their pride in the Klopse band, in their roles as trombonist and percussionist, in the music, in being part of this family and community tradition. Some participants pictured in the book explained how through Klopse they had sidestepped the temptations of alcohol, even in some cases the agonies of tik addiction and gangsterism, struggles they saw friends face. This type of integrating and connecting wove through the Klopse book as a publication.
FIGURE 19. The Klopse Book
For both the Civic and the troupe, the book made clear to the world “who we are and what we are: proud and disciplined.” As noted in chapter 3, Gerty explained this crisply in the book’s introduction:
Although we were more than successful in stopping the problem of fighting between gangs and drug trafficking in our area [and we fought for and won our housing project], we still faced a stigma. When people hear of Valhalla Park, they associated our area with the 28 Gang and drugs. We needed to do something to show the world out there and the people out there—standing in Cape Town, across the Cape Flats, in the surrounding areas—to show them here we are. We come from Valhalla Park. This is what we are doing in Valhalla Park. And this is what we can do. (2010)
It was this motivation that had led to the establishment of a minstrel troupe in 2005.
For both the troupe and the Civic, as well as for the Klopse Board in which they competed, the book worked to counter a broader politics in the city, in which Klopse was contested, understood as disorganized, chaotic, as a working-class, “coloured” practice and performance, problematically racialized, representative of a racist history. As Mrs. Kamalie explained in the book, “It’s my history, my mother’s, my grandparents’—it’s part of me, part of the Cape, part of slavery” (2010). Klopse Boards argued that Klopse and its citywide celebration was developmental, that it worked to build community. This argument was discounted, even ridiculed by the city and by politicians, especially in budget processes for funding the Klopse New Year celebrations and in the bureaucratic processes to get permission to compete in stadia around the Cape Flats. It was this politics with which the book resonated, sharing Klopse as activism, a practice that forged crucial bonds that held this neighborhood and this city together.
“The Story of Sewende Laan Is like a Book”
Similarly, My 7de Laan shared a David-and-Goliath story, the story of a group of families living in an informal settlement and the Civic, an organization with no resources that contested the city’s intent to destroy the settlement. This short book tracked the struggle for security that marked Sewende Laan residents’ accounts of their lives, the meaningfulness of building and fighting for the right to remain in this settlement. This was an alternate story of city building that documented the hard-fought ways in which the nearly one hundred families involved defended themselves against the city’s attempts to demolish the settlement. The book included each family’s story and photographs of them and their homes.
Scattered across its pages were small-scale plans of the settlement’s self-built homes, the piece-by-piece evidence of families building Sewende Laan. The book mapped the settlement’s struggles and achievements, the stories of its streets and families, which were not recorded either officially in the city’s maps, or physically with literal street signs. George Rosenberg Avenue and Gertrude Square Street, for instance, paid homage to Gerty and to George, now sadly deceased, as Civic leaders and as key leaders in the Sewende Laan struggle.
In the introduction to the book, Gerty framed the land occupation and its defense as part of the Civic’s work, its commitment to supporting families struggling with shelter. Several partners, for instance, lived in Sewende Laan: Dan and Lefien, while Mina migrated in that period between her shack in Sewende Laan and her mother’s house, her kids living with their grandmother in the winter, and then, over time, all year long.
We distributed the book to the residents of Sewende Laan, to other neighbors, to the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), the NGO that defended the settlement in court. They requested twenty copies of the book to distribute to funders and to others in similar struggles elsewhere in the country. The book stood in part as testimony to the meaningfulness of this NGO’s work. Beyond the precise legal judgment and the work in court, the stories in the booklet spoke to what the NGO’s defense meant in everyday terms to this settlement, to the Civic, and to Valhalla Park. It shared the relief and the joy families felt in their hard-won security, being legally allowed to persist and build their lives in the settlement. It gave intimate, personal meaning to the broad-brush constitutional rights that the NGO defended and for which it and the Civic fought. It documented a combination of sacrifice and hard work, of great success and its significance. The book recorded as well the paradox that despite the court ruling that formal housing, services, and legal title must be granted by the city, Sewende Laan families persisted, waiting still for the court judgment to be made material in the form of formal housing.
I reflected on both books, on what was political and advocatory in them, and on their popularity, their meaningfulness. They resonated with and shook up my own writing on urban politics, challenging my narrower notions of what constituted scholarly narration and argument. In the resonance of the Klopse stories, for instance, it struck me how singular, blinkered even, my own thinking on the Civic and its activism had been, focused, like the literature I am in conversation with, on material struggles, on services, on a narrow set of issues driven by a particular notion of radical politics. While spectacular, often hugely successful, even epic, these threads of activism traced in the literature, and in my own writing, were partial. They were limited in both a language of development, in a practice of policy that was city driven, and in narrow scholarly notions of progressive activism and its politics. At the same time, the Klopse story disrupted the phenomenon’s narrow conceptualization, reworking common sense notions of its legacy, its politics, its place in the city today. The stories in the book challenged its reduction to a racial stereotype, a tourist spectacle, a middle-class embarrassment as an apartheid hangover. As Gerty claimed and demonstrated, against common sense, an activist could be a minstrel and a minstrel an activist.
FIGURE 20. My Sewende Laan
As a genre, these short books traveled in and across the neighborhood, the city, and beyond. They had ripple effects, offering resonant stories of activism for land and housing, for identity in Klopse, for a place in city politics. This mode of writing and critique—in partnership—met celebration and performance, a positive neighborhood building. In their meeting, in their rubbing up against each other, we could rethink developmental categories. We could find ways to challenge and rework notions of dysfunction that stigmatized the neighborhood and our partners, categories that so easily laced urban debates in a language of exception, dysfunction, and dystopia. We unsettled and conceptually enriched notions of “politics” and its subjectivities and city practices, the political terrain in which the partnership operated.
Spinning Off, Student Research
Alex, my student, and Suki, our partner, teamed up to explore the ways in which local informal businesses link with citywide and, in some cases, transnational trade networks. Francis worked with Mina, Gerty’s daughter, in Agste Laan, documenting young women’s bodily insecurities in the settlement; Rifqah, with Uncle Dan, continued interviewing families about state grants; Evan worked with Lefien to explore neighborhood women’s histories of work in and retrenchments from Cape Town’s textile industries. In different periods, Simone joined up with Gerty to research water cutoffs, Inge to explore histories of eviction. Siân and Saskia developed their master’s thesis research through the partnership, working with Gerty and me.
Well-thumbed housing waiting list letters shared by residents in the research project on overcrowded neighborhood rental housing inspired Saskia, for instance, to build on the partnership for her master’s thesis. In interviews, residents shared these letters. They pulled them out of a box or a pile, or found them neatly ordered in a drawer or cupboard. As third-year students in the project on overcrowded public housing, she and her research partners had tracked and traced this evidence from household to household in the project on overcrowded rental housing. The research group started the process of documenting the ways young and grown-up “children” and older residents alike prioritized signing up on state waiting lists to access state-built housing, even though access in the short and long term was so unlikely. The idea incubated and a few years later, Saskia registered for a master’s degree under my supervision to develop this research on waiting for housing further. In Siân’s case, during her work as a postgraduate assistant for the partnership, she was struck by conversations with the few residents who had purchased homes in the neighborhood, through a government policy option to promote home ownership and sell off city rental stock, something rarely mentioned in our work on housing. I approached Gerty and our partners to include these thesis projects as extensions of our partnership.
There was something beautifully generative about these links between student thesis research and the partnership work, which proved a space to find and then imagine research, to cultivate an issue, to frame it in its dynamics, its importance, its situatedness in the neighborhood. Waiting for housing, for instance, was taken for granted, uncommented on. Over lifetimes, and across generations, public housing in the neighborhood had become almost uniformly overcrowded, housing grandparents, parents, grown children, and their children. Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of those over eighteen were registered as waiting for homes from the city. But what did younger generations expect when they signed up for housing? Did they expect to receive a home? What did they do in the “meanwhile,” while they waited for years, sometimes decades, to move into their own homes? In contrast, the choice to purchase a home in the neighborhood was quite rare. What motivated those families? What were their logics and investments, their engagement with the city, their expectations of the Civic? Gerty helped Saskia and Siân, respectively, develop these research questions.
The situating of the project in the partnership provided a place to arrive and depart, literally in Gerty’s living room and kitchen. The legitimacy of this student research was encased in Gerty’s presence, her status as a Civic leader, and our long-term commitment to our research partnership. It figuratively framed the research in a far longer conversation, one that exceeded the bounds of a thesis project. This thick set of relationships shaped how interviewees responded and engaged. It outlined the expectations for this research, linking it to the Civic’s mobilization for homes and the organization’s claims and encounters with the city. It situated the work in a rigorous set of expectations that the work would be relevant and rooted in the neighborhood.
Yet, a thesis is not conventionally a collaborative collective project. Its syntax and its form are organized individually, assessed by examiners; the protocols of research are individually driven, or at least asserted as such. A clear and well-developed thesis must be disciplined, rigorous, framed in and conceived through engagement with scholarly literatures, by a discipline and its knowledge and writing norms. The thesis work and writing were conceived and undertaken as part of an offshoot of the partnership, its long-term work, its forms of accounting. Students stressed how hard they worked because of our partners and because the research engaged concrete, taken-for-granted lived realities in the neighborhood.
I found the large and small maps, which had been displayed at meetings, bundled together in a tube in the corner of my office, reams of student papers on the bookshelf, and student theses stashed in a drawer. Documents, reports, papers, photographs, maps, stories, data, recordings, and transcripts of conversations, life and family histories were our partnership’s archive, a vast and varied mix produced over the decade. Files and files of student journals chronicled the research process, its learning, field notes as companions. These varied documents sat side-by-side with folders of newspaper clippings, piles of articles, policy documents, and city data, with the web of publications we generated. Laced in memories, sights, sounds, the inspirations and joys of our collaboration, its energy and enthusiasm, the archive lived on in our pedagogy, the modes of our collaboration, our learning and confidence in our research capacities. This was our partnership archive.
In search of our early research findings, less cataloged and copied, I dropped by several partners’ homes to ask if they still had copies of their group research reports. These visits were a chance to reminisce and visit, to catch up after a long while. I found Washiela at home. Following her parents’ deaths, she had stopped participating in our projects, taken up with the care of her and her sister’s children. Washiela pulled out her group’s report. She emerged quickly with it, a reflection of her newly renovated and well-ordered home. Fatima found hers under the bed. In passing, Masnoena said she would have a good look. Zaaida found hers and Gerty’s in a box, stashed in the lounge unit, at the bottom of a box of documents, a marker of the years that had passed.
FIGURE 21. Scrutinizing the posters
As I gathered and pieced together these varied materials, this archive, I was struck by the fact that—a decade later—the reports were intact, remembered, held onto. Shelved across the city, publications were dispersed in cupboards in Valhalla Park, in my office, elsewhere at UCT, in my home. The Yellow Pages we had produced were spread across neighborhood households. Klopse booklets were prized possessions, hung onto by troupe captains and directors; they had made their way into board members’ pockets and cupboards elsewhere in Cape Town. The Klopse posters, laminated so they would survive, were slipped behind Gerty’s wardrobe in her bedroom, pulled out at troupe meetings in the years following the research project. The Sewende Laan book sat in the Legal Resources Centre’s offices in town, a few copies off elsewhere in the country. Made up of many pieces, the archive stretched in and between the neighborhood, the university, and beyond.
We lost and we gained in these interwoven writing choices and strategies, in a book and its investment in celebrating a right to occupy land; in an article’s commitment to a right to the city, an elite and popular politics; in our Yellow Pages and its politics of building the neighborhood economy. We spun in and beyond the neighborhood, spinning a web of publications and publics. Some parts of this web were networked, interlaced together. Other parts were entangled, knotted tightly in place. Publications wove together, plural, layered, and multidimensional. They gave the web shape and scope. Some were durable and long lasting, others faded with time, ephemeral, short lived. Some were intimate, proximate, others distant; some fragile, others bold. Some were distinct, unique, interconnecting momentarily, spinning out in specific ways, singular and narrow. Some stretched and included, were receptive and adaptive. They wove together thickly, existing beyond a particular project. In this web, we built an embodied and living archive across the decade, constituted in the partnership and its varied publications and publics.
Publications had varied origins, purposes, and intents. Some genres, such as posters and maps, recurred annually; they sat at the heart of the partnership and its process of working and researching. They sustained our partnership, beyond projects and semester-long courses. They showed the limits of our work, as well. Some forms of research and writing became provocations to act; others were put aside. Some found shape in a neighborhood and city discourse, and some spun through the geopolitics of urban theory, its rooting and reshaping in often-southern city experiences. In each a politics was at play, sometimes fraught, at other times positive; sometimes powerful, at other times latent and ambivalent.
We experimented with varied strategies to improve and deepen the outputs of the research, ways to share project outcomes and effects. These ideas reflected careful planning, the inspiration of each project and its emergent arguments, as well as the intuitiveness and contingencies of the partnership work. We experimented to push further, to follow our hunches, to pursue ideas, to push boundaries. And sometimes we searched in the dark. We navigated the complexities of everyday life, of city making, its strategy and dissonance, the hurt, material deprivation, and violence, the generosity and care. The partnership located this work, in literal, epistemological, social, and emotional terms. It was epistemological, collective, accountable, and embodied, forged in the relationships through which we built and sustained the partnership.
Rooted in the partnership, its processes and projects, the partnership archive was varied. It challenged narrow definitions of knowledge making. Publications did not materialize in a single type or form, in a bounded or narrow notion of “theory.” In extending and connecting genres and publics, each publication was an intervention that was concrete and specific, sometimes powerful in its simplicity. Each publication, its stories, form, and questions helped rejig our imagination of how we might theorize. Across this web, what worked and for whom, when, and where exceeded any simplistic notion of what might be useful or popular, academic or scholarly.
The partnership’s archive unsettles and disrupts a narrow notion of what counts as research in academia. In its geographies, the archive linked us, working across the topography of publics to whom we accounted, with whom we engaged, through whom we hoped and worked to change our city. The partnership produced a wider, thicker, rigorous mix of publication—from mapping and directories to pamphlets and books, to process documents and teaching materials, to journal articles and this monograph. In its varieties of forms and uses, it offers a wider, rooted, and located body of work, a flourishing of form and genre, of intent and use, of publics and audiences, of impacts and registers. In the archive’s varied forms and uses, publications produced in partnership extend and deepen narrow conventional notions of academic research. In this frame of work, theorizing in partnership challenges conventional university notions of what counts as research. In doing urban studies differently, the partnership makes problematic the dominance of a narrow form of scholarly publication. In collaborative work, what is at stake is the edifice of academia, its capacity to respond, to engage, to account, to take root, and to find relevance across the city.
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